262 THE REV. THEODORE WOOD, F.E.S., ON 
One of the boys under his charge fell upon the school-room 
floor while struggling with a companion, and in so doing 
drove a tolerably large splinter of wood beneath the entire 
length of one of his finger nails, He made an attempt to 
exiract it, but without success ; and, finding that it did not 
inconvenience him, said nothing about the matter to the 
authorities. In the course of a few days, however, the wound. 
very naturally festered, and the boy was sent to a surgeon ; 
a proceeding to which he took exception, on the ground that 
he felt no pain. The surgeon, however, on examination, 
pronounced the case to be a bad one, and declared that the 
finger nail must be removed; an operation which he pro- 
ceeded then and there to perform. At its close, he looked 
up at his patient, with a word or two of praise for the 
remarkable courage with which he had borne the severe 
suffering inflicted upon him, and was utterly amazed to find 
that the boy had been watching his proceedings throughout 
with the liveliest interest, but without the slightest idea that 
he ought to have been suffering excruciating pam. The 
removal of the nail, in fact, had caused him no real pain 
whatever, although he had undergone what is commonly 
regarded as perhaps the most severe of the minor operations 
in surgery. 
This particular boy, perhaps, may be regarded as somewhat 
of a natural phenomenon; but it is a matter of common 
experience among schoolmasters that corporal punishment is 
as unequal in its effects upon different recipients as can well 
be the case. To one boy a fewstrokes with the birch or the 
cane are nothing—scarcely felt at the time, and forgotten in 
five minutes. ‘To another they represent an amount of 
anguish under which nature almost gives way. And there 
can be little doubt that much of the shrinking from physical 
suffering which we observe in many individuals of either sex 
is due to an unusual susceptibility to pain, with which they 
are endowed by nature, and which can be neither appre- 
ciated nor understood by those of more vigorous nervous 
organization. 
But the capacity for appreciating pain, in the human sub- 
ject, is not only to some extent a matter of temperament ; it 
is also, and very largely, a consequence of (a) Civilization 
and (8) Education. 
(a) It is almost a matter of common notoriety that pain to 
the savage and pain to the civilized man are so different in 
character and degree as practically to constitute two totally 
